Electronic devices such as household appliances, audio-video equipment, computers, and telephones operate within a given environment such as the home of a user. However, these devices function independently of one another. The user must initiate actions on the devices to cause the devices to change to a particular state of operation to thereby perform a function desired by the user.
Often, the state of one or more of the electronic devices is related to the state of one or more other electronic devices within the same environment. For example, a user may be watching television (TV) when the telephone rings. The user wishes to answer the call, but to effectively communicate with the caller, the user must mute the television so that sound from the TV does not interfere with the telephone conversation. Every time a telephone call is to be answered while the user watches TV, the user must again repeat the muting process. For each call, once the user hangs up the phone, the TV must be manually unmuted so that the user can once again listen to the TV program being watched.
The TV-telephone scenario discussed above is only one example. There is an undeterminable number of scenarios and devices involved within a given environment. In each scenario, the devices do not communicate with one another and do not coordinate activities, and as a result the user is overly burdened. The number of electronic devices for a household is continually increasing, and the resulting burden on the user to manually coordinate states of the devices for given scenarios is increasing as well.
To address this problem, devices can be configured with communication abilities so that they can communicate with one another when one or more devices experience a user driven state change. However, to establish coordination among the devices so that automatic responses to state changes may occur, interaction rules must exist that dictate the communication and coordination. Because every environment may have a unique grouping of devices and the desired response may differ from one user to the next, it is infeasible to pre-establish the interaction rules for each device of the environment. Furthermore, it adds to the burdens on the user if the user must manually program the interaction rules for each device.
Therefore, there is a need for automatically establishing interaction rules for the electronic devices within an environment that dictate the communication and coordination of activity among the devices to reduce the burden placed on the user.